Americans with disabilities still struggle to find employment

From MarketWatch:

SAN FRANCISCO -- Jim de Jong remembers when his buddies took him bowling when he first got out of a rehabilitation hospital after suffering an accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down 34 years ago.

His friends tried to lift him onto the lane area, but the business owner said he didn't have the necessary insurance and turned them away, said de Jong, a wheelchair user since 1976.

The incident happened more than a dozen years before President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, a landmark law that aimed to give the disabled equal access to employment, transportation, government services and public accommodations.

"Now I go to bowling alleys and you can roll out onto them -- not all the lanes but a couple of them," de Jong said. "That's cool for kids to be able to do that with their friends."

Since its passage in 1990, the ADA has greatly improved the physical environment for people with disabilities, he said.

"You have kids coming out expecting accessibility now," de Jong said. "They didn't go through years questioning whether they could get on a bus or not."

As the law marks its 20th year, experts and advocates hail its successes, many of them visible -- things such as handicapped parking, restroom access, building entrances wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs and sidewalks indented with curb ramps and detectable warnings for the visually impaired. Even ordinary crosswalks at intersections come courtesy of the ADA.

"The ADA was one of the first laws, internationally speaking, that provided civil rights for people with disabilities," said Pratik Patel, president of EZFire, a consulting firm in New York, and a director on the board of the Society for Disability Studies. "It started the ball rolling, and laws in many other countries like the U.K. are based on the ADA."

The law has performed best in improving physical access to public facilities, said Larry Paradis, executive director of Disability Rights Advocates, a nonprofit law firm in Berkeley, Calif. "In the area of technology, it's starting to make a big impact -- things like access to the Internet for people who are blind."

But employment appears to be where the law has fallen short so far.

"People with disabilities still are disproportionately unemployed and underemployed," Paradis said. "That's the biggest challenge in terms of making a difference after 20 years."

Only a third of working-age people with disabilities were in the workforce in June compared with nearly 78% of people without disabilities, according to the U.S. Labor Department. That means they either had a job or were actively looking for one.

About 19% of people with a disability were employed in June compared with 64% of people without a disability.

Last week, President Obama issued an executive order to increase the number of people with disabilities employed by the federal government. Only 5% of 2.5 million federal workers have disabilities, Obama said. Across the U.S., an estimated 54 million Americans are living with a disability.

Ken Altenburger (pictured), 47, started losing his vision to diabetic retinopathy in the early 1990s and recalls the obstacles he faced when he got his first guide dog four years later.

"Back in '96, between taxi cabs and restaurants, it seemed there was always a problem," he said, of entering establishments with his canine guide.

Today, he still gets pushback from some outlets that try to keep his dog out, but says he has to explain his rights less frequently than he did 15 years ago.

"I typically find out after the fact it's a new business owner and they just aren't familiar with the laws yet," said Altenburger, an administrator with Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, Calif.

He's been employed at Guide Dogs' headquarters for 13 years, thanks in part to screen-reader software that lets him function at the computer nearly as easily as office workers without disabilities.

But adaptive technology remains expensive for many people with visual impairment, he said. "We still haven't crossed that barrier where it's affordable to everybody."

It's critical for employers to comply with the spirit as well as the letter of the law, said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents nearly 300 large employers.

"To maintain our standard of living, we really have to have every human in the country highly productive," she said. "It's in our selfish interests to make that happen. That's what a lot of the Americans with Disabilities Act is about."

In a previous job at a large company, Darling was asked by an employee with a chronic disease that compromised her balance whether her employer would cover the costs associated with walking her service dog when she was on business travel.

"That wasn't a big problem," she said. "This woman was obviously doing remarkable things to continue her job, to be a success, and what she was asking was truly reasonable."

Where the law gets tricky is around how much and what kind of accommodation is required for people who have mental or behavioral disabilities, she said. "It's in really hard-to-pin-down-and-respond-to disabilities that it's a challenge."

"It's very hard to find jobs these days without stress," she said, citing the example of someone who might want the same job and pay but without the negatives. "You're in a complicated dilemma then. Even in a big company, you just can't take somebody and say 'We'll put you way over here' unless that kind of job is available."

Still, some of the ways employers can better accommodate workers with disabilities involve common alternatives, such as telecommuting, that benefit all employees, she said.

"That would help a lot of people with disabilities because some of the challenges are just getting to and from work," Darling said. "That's a challenge for everybody."

Under the ADA, a disability is defined as an impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. A person also needs to have a record of having a disability or be regarded as having one. In 2008, Congress passed a second law, the ADA Amendments Act, to broaden the definition of disability, especially for people with episodic conditions whose flare-ups are debilitating.

A patchwork of federal agencies including the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission interprets the law and sets regulations.

A lot of work remains to be done in making health-care facilities -- doctors' exam room tables, for example -- accessible to people in wheelchairs and including people with disabilities in disaster-planning efforts, Paradis said.

In the meantime, demographic realities are helping advance the idea of universal design, a similar philosophy of making the physical environment more user-friendly for people of all abilities and ages.

"The fact that our aging population is going to need these access features is motivating more builders and architects to incorporate elements of universal design," Paradis said. "There's a lot still being built, though, that's not accessible. Most private housing is not accessible."

"Our goal is to have builders and architects incorporate access from the get-go," he said. "But it sometimes takes a lawsuit or two before they understand that access is legally required."

Both de Jong, who helped push for passage of the ADA and is executive director of the Great Plains ADA Center in Columbia, Mo., and Altenburger of Guide Dogs for the Blind have ideas for hotels.

"If you're in a hotel room, one of the things you should have is a wing handle on faucets so you could open or close it with a fist," de Jong said.

Audio in elevators also would help blind people know which floor they're on, Altenburger said.

"A lot of them chime as they go up -- just bing, bing, bing," he said. "So if you can count the bings, that's OK, but sometimes you can't. The newer hotels are putting in audio saying 'This is floor one; this is floor two.'"